Prior magazine advertisements have featured pages with tear-out portions containing order forms or return mail cards with a business reply address pre-printed thereon. Magazine and newspaper print advertisements have also contained tear away coupons relating to an advertised product.
Print media advertisements with responsive tear-outs served a useful purpose in that they elicited from a potential customer either actual sales or a response which indicated a measure of the effectiveness of the advertising and marketing promotion of the product.
A typical magazine response advertisement of this format was illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,159,329 issued Dec. 1, 1964. While useful as a marketing tool, the response advertisement had some drawbacks, one of which involved its relatively complicated and costly structure which included the application of marginal adhesive layers. A further drawback related to its recipient base, that is, only readers of the publication would possibly see the advertisement.
In a similar vein, the printed folder disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,718,277, issued Feb. 27, 1973 featured printed material and a return mailer. The potential customer base of such advertisement was enhanced by the selectiveness of the appropriate mailing list employed. While the folder presented an improvement over the magazine tear-out response mailer of U.S. Pat. No. 3,159,329, it too had disadvantages. One of such disadvantages was the printing costs and related expense of the large folder itself. In addition, the folder portion remaining after the tear-out response was removed was usually discarded. Thus, the folders of U.S. Pat. No. 3,718,277 may not have been worth the expense of printing, construction and mailing in terms of response rate.